“Truth is One and the learned call it by many names.” Rig Veda

“Too many people think they have an open mind when it’s just vacant.” Anon

“Truth is no theory, no speculative system of philosophy, no intellectual insight. Truth is exact correspondence with reality. For man, truth is the unshakeable knowledge of his real nature, his Self.” Paramansa Yogananda

So I’m on a spiritual path, trying to find out what that path is all about, where it comes from and what the destination is, if there is one. I pick up books, go to workshops, rituals, churches and other things trying to make sense of the universe and myself, and find some meaning for it all if there is any. Some of them say that some greater being called God creates meaning, some say there is no God and we create our own meaning, some say there is no God or meaning but to live anyway, some don’t know and don’t care and some say all of these are parts of “The Truth” and that this truth cannot be known in it’s entirety.

So I’ve looked at monotheism, pantheism, animism, atheism, agnosticism, nihilism, polytheism and whatever other ‘ism’ I could get my eager thoughts on. I became what I called a Chaos Philosopher, which is like a Chaos Magician but without the emphasis on magic and more emphasis on philosophising (what a suprise lol)
There seemed to be no one truth, meaning, law or explanation on reality in human thought, only a “chaos” of ideas to choose from, which made me think if there is a universal truth it must be a chaos. I nearly became so sponge minded that I thought all of life, inner and outer was all a guessing game.

I became something else, something I call a Spiritual Agnostic, meaning I don’t know anything and yet I still had a spiritual urge in me that liked meaning and inner-evolution. In some ways I rationalised this as just another instinct that appeared in human kind as just another biproduct of evolution. Maybe that’s “true”, I still don’t fully know, but I know that when you’re trying to guess spiritual things without direction it’s not good, especially as humans need direction and meaning, something that has been too vague for me and my life. I was just carried away by the tides of societies “necessities” and fitting in my meaning where I could.

This is the difficult situation that most people have, that we fit our lives around the demands of society, wedging individual truth where we can and forgetting that society was created for the individual not the other way around. So meaning becomes what societal habits and conventions give us not something that we can say is ours.

Now I’m fortunate to live in a situation where society is a tool for me instead of using me as one. I now have freedom to develope or find my own personal truth without personal inteference. But there is a challenge for me. I feel like a battery hen that’s only known a small box, a bit of food and laying eggs as life, then it’s been released and found itself amongst some free range chicken. FREEDOM! This doesn’t sound like a challenge except in some ways I don’t know what to do with that freedom. With a liberated battery hen you’ll notice it doesn’t do too much adventuring, it watches the free range chicken wondering what they’re doing and unsure of the big open space before it. But eventually it follows the example of the others and practices it’s freedom. Like myself, I’m making steps out of the box world that has been built within my psychology to discover what truth and meaning are for me.

So once again, in a better, free context, what is meaning or truth and is there a difference between them? Well I think their is “one truth”, a universal law that affects all. To me it’s a common ground on which everything in the universe can interact and percieve one another. If you (the reader) and I (the writer) lived in completely separate realities or truths then there’d be no way for us to interact, there’d be no common law to determine how we should interact. We couldn’t even percieve one another as on a quantum level nothing can be percieved without being effected.

So in this case, this common ground or Cosmic Truth as we shall call it is so essential to reality that nothing can be in accord or discord from it. We cannot “fall” from it or “be saved” by it like it was some God that wants us to behave in some ways and not others, in fact such a God could not determine this Cosmic Truth but would be subject to it instead. Cosmic Truth itself is Self-So, meaning it is only subject to itself not to something other.

Can we use this Cosmic Truth to determine how to live our lives? No, it is not a Way for the individual to live by, it is the Way of the entire Universe. There’s is no way to know or be ignorant of it that makes it an advantage or disadvantage like a science or scripture because, like I said, you can neither find accord or discord with it, so fundamental is it to reality.

If a human did try to “follow” Cosmic Truth then it could create chaos in that life because it allows a diverse multitude of things that have no common direction or meaning except that they exist in the same way. A human life trying to be governed by this would then have no meaning and just become a random product, which is not what humans are. We live our lives, not by a chaotic meaning but by an ordered meaning and that ordered meaning cannot be found through the group journey of humans but through each individual. But each individual in the service of societies directions become nothing more than another “random product.”

The truth of the individual I call the Self and I shall repeate the words of Paramhansa Yogananda, “For man, truth is the unshakeable knowledge of his real nature, his Self.” This Self is within us and beyond us but never found outside of us. It is within us because it the fabric of a being’s Being, it is its centre and the substance of which it is made. It is beyond us because it does not conform to our circumstances or conditioning. And no matter how hard you try you’ll never find it outside because the Being or Self is unique to each being and cannot be shared. It is not some that controls but rather guides, it doesn’t produce a random life, instead it creates an organic order, so long as the individual doesn’t conform to truths that do not belong to it.

I have the freedom now to find my truth, the Self, and nurture that as it should be nurtured and maybe, if my Self allows for it, guide others to the meaning and truth of their Self.